Drugs, booze, hotel rooms, David Mitchell and some last minute stress

I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but I didn't blog yesterday because I felt AWFUL.

Monday night I went to bed at about 9pm, and woke up at about 9am Tues. My nose was bunged up and I still had that "ache behind the eyes" feeling. Good job I raided Boots at the airport:

Drugs.....

Still the room here is lovely with a very comfy bed and I was pleased to spend some quality time there.

Bed........

I spent pretty much all of Tuesday doing NOTHING. I had my breakfast, came back to my room, had a little sleep, got woken up by housekeeping, went back to room, had another little sleep. In between this I sent some whinging emails to Gobi who has been very good at humouring me in my pathetic girl-flu state, and I have watched several series of Peep Show on my laptop from my sick bed with a bin full of snotty tissues next to me. Watching Peep Show always cheers me up. :)

Trying to be positive, I remember talking to one of the 100 Marathon club blokes at Connemara who was saying he did his Marathon PB at the tail end of a cold because it had forced him to relax so for little me that just really wants to get round there is definitely hope.

It got to about 5pm yesterday and I realised despite taking on a lot of water during the day I'd completely missed having any lunch (to be fair the breakfast at 10.00 was fairly massive so no matter really). I went down to the bar to get something. Plenty of nice food in the bar, went for fish since I'm next to a fairly whopping great puddle full of it leaping about and since I am in Ireland:

Driiiiink!!

I'm not sure if it was the bug, the fact I hadn't had lunch or the fact that I don't usually drink at all (I do like Irish Guinness though and I thought a pint with my food would be nice...) but as I got up to sign for my bill I felt decidedly weird. Before you all laugh at what a lightweight I am, I'm fairly sure I wasn't pissed on one pint of the black stuff, but I got to the downstairs lift and had to lean against it. As I got out I almost felt like I was going to pass out, walking along the corridoor to the room thinking "please let me make it - this will be embarassing if I flake out in the corridoor" and "I really don't need this NOW". I made it to my room and I lay down on the bed for 5 mins burning up - sweating but it seemed to solve the issue. A bit scary though. When I got up I felt quite a lot better.

Of course all this sleeping in the day meant it took me a while to drop off but another solid 8 hours sleep and this morning I woke up minus the aforementioned "ache behind the eyes". I am still snotty but I can deal with that. Views like this soothe the eyes:

The view eating my lunch

Tonight was the race briefing at the hotel I am staying at. Or at least most of the participants thought so. However an hour waiting around and then  a quick call to the race organizer, it turned out that the numbers were to be collected in Moville, 4 miles up the road from the Hotel. "Did you not get the email I sent last week?" Errr. That will be a resounding NO?

I got talking to 3 Irish chaps doing the same challenge, however when they offered to give me a lift to Moville they seemed nice enough but I sort of didn't feel comfortable with it (It's one thing sharing a taxi with a slightly camp hotel worker). Thankfully a nice man named Geoff also doing the Quad, his wife and their two daughters took pity on me and we whizzed up to get the info. Geoff did the Longford Marathon on Sunday (was my PB course for a long time) and now he's doing 4x4 - he runs 2:45 marathons. Aaaargh I *am* going to be last. Do I care? No not really.

So here I am. This is it. And I have a bright red nose for all the photos. :)

I am not a number.